Join us as we delve into the World Happiness Report with the distinguished Professor Emeritus John Helliwell. As a founding editor of the report, Professor Helliwell shares the origins of the report, the methodology behind measuring happiness, and the profound implications of the findings.
Discover the pivotal role of the 2011 UN Resolution supported by Bhutan, the importance of subjective well-being data, and how the report has evolved to influence global perspectives on happiness and well-being. Learn about the top-ranking countries and the factors that contribute to their success, as well as surprising findings from this year's report.
Professor Helliwell also explores the significance of social connections, trust, and benevolence, shedding light on how these elements impact our daily lives and national policies. This episode is a deep dive into the science of happiness and a call to integrate well-being into every aspect of decision-making.
Tune in to understand how we can all contribute to a happier, more compassionate world.
Resources
The World Happiness Report 2024: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/
The Gallup poll:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/612125/happiest-country-earth.aspx
Sustainable Development Solutions Network:
https://www.gallup.com/analytics/247355/gallup-world-happiness-report.aspx
What's the happiest country in the world?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/612125/happiest-country-earth.aspx
The Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford: https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/
Professor Helliwell’s book recommendation:
Gawande, A. (2014). Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company.
https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/
Where to listen to this episode
Content
Guest: John Helliwell
Host, producer and editor: Amy Smith
Recorded & produced at the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva
[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the next page, the podcast of the Librarian Archives dedicated to advancing the conversation on multilateralism. I'm Amy Smith and today we're going to dive into hearing more about the World Happiness Report. I'm very happy that we have with us here today Professor John Helliworld. Professor Helliworld doesn't really need an introduction. He's a Canadian economist, distinguished fellow, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He's Professor Emeritus of Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and he is a founding editor of the World Happiness Report. Professor Helliworld, welcome to the next page. Good to be here. Perhaps we can start a little unusually with a question not for you but for our listeners so that our listeners can get an idea of how happiness is being measured in the World Happiness Report. Let's start with the question from the Gallup poll. So please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? We will let our listeners think about their answer whilst we turn back the clock to hear a little bit about when all of this started back in 2011. So in 2011 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution 65309 and it was supported by the country of Bhutan and the resolution stated that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal and it recognized the need for a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness and well-being of all peoples. John, you are one of the founding editors of the World Happiness Report. What's the relation between the report and the resolution and would you tell us a little bit more about how the first report was born? Yes, the resolution led immediately after in July of that same year 2011 to a meeting co-chaired by Jeff Sacks, who was the advisor to the Secretary-General and Prime Minister Thinly of Bhutan in Timpoo in order to plan the next step. So there are a variety of experts from around the world called together. I was personally there in part because I had been doing work with subjective well-being generally including while the Gallup World poll from its beginning in 2005 and in Bhutanese and Gross National Happiness conferences. I was one of the people there following that conference. There was a meeting in the Prime Minister's office where Richard Laird, who had also been involved in both Gross National Happiness and Happiness Studies, his own book on Happiness that come out in 2005. Jeffrey Sacks and Richard Laird and I were meeting with the Prime Minister and his staff including especially those people concerned with well-being within the Bhutanese government to plan the next steps. It was already set at that time that there would be a high-level meeting at the United Nations in New York in the following year, 2012, April. It was, I think, Jeffrey Sacks, who suggested that in order to fuel that meeting, which was to have a dual objective to happiness and well-being and also sustainable development, there should be to support the well-being part of that scientific report of what is known about subjective well-being around the world. What do these measures mean and what are their implications? So the three of us edited that report. I, having worked with the data most directly of all the three of us, was essentially putting together the data side of it. We were surprised and gratified both that the UN meeting itself drew enormous interest from within the UN establishment. Some of our friends there said they'd never seen a meeting that attracted so many other people from the building to sit in on the meeting because, of course, you know, it's difficult to get into those premises, overflow rooms, they were filling out. So quite clearly there was a chord being struck within people whose day jobs were handling some other aspect of the UN missions in order to focus on happiness and well-being. And there were only a thousand copies of the report and they went out of the boxes in moments and were very hot items thereafter. And the take-up of what came out of that meeting, in world media and by many individuals and governments, was such that we agreed the second report would be a good idea. And so we produced one 18 months later that was released at Columbia University and then another one 18 months after that, by which time the UN had established a world happiness day on March the 20th. So some of the representatives that that meeting said really we should be putting the report out on world happiness day on an annual basis. We were a little nervous about that. Those of us who have to produce the data and write the report every year, we agreed that made sense. That left us only a 10-month interval before the next June. So we called the next report the 2016 report an update. It was launched in the Bank of Italy and the Vatican in Rome. And thereafter we've had annual reports with increasing, I think increasing acceptance and broadening knowledge around the world. And the evidence for that is from the change in focus of what national development should be about. From purely output and economic measures, the income-related measures and the health-related measures and working condition-related measures to broader measures of overall well-being. To have those data and of course the central feature of the world happiness reports is that we actually have comparable data for 150 countries about how life is going in those countries, not as defined by experts, but as reported by individuals themselves, answering the question you spoke out at the beginning of this interview. And so it isn't us who makes these judgments. It's the individual people we're only responsible for putting them together and doing the empirical work correctly. We average over three years in order that things shouldn't be too variable. And then we concentrate our efforts in explaining what are these likely sources of higher well-being in different societies and then inviting experts in various fields to write chapters on what they know and can contribute to this underlying science. I think you said the word only. It sounds like an awful lot to do every year. You've spoken a lot about the context that the report came about and then the enthusiasm for it. Looking back what you also see as being the antecedents that were in place that enabled this report to be built at that time. Bhutan through its gross national happiness conferences had in fact brought by, I mean it's such a nice image to say as the king of Bhutan did in 1994. It's not about gross national product. We should be focused on gross national happiness. So that then became part of the image and increasingly people around the world who were trying to look beyond GDP and were drawn into the gross national happiness conferences were building a constituency of people who actually were on the ground working to deliver better lives in various ways. Secondly there was an ongoing movement saying looking at GDP is not enough independently of the Bhutanese led ventures. And thirdly of course there was the availability of much better data and the galat world poll has been an essential feature of that. We're already the world values surveys that I've used in my earlier work but to have the same questions asked in the same way in an internationally comparable format in so many countries then provided a framework of data that was essential. So all of these things happening at the first years of this century then made it quite natural for the resolution to come before the UN when it did the take up to be what it has been. You talk about the things that were necessary before but then the immediate consequence was something that we'd hoped would happen but happen much more quickly and more extensively and in some sense more importantly than we thought. In order to make this change to well-being you have to have data you have to have people knowing these data you have to have people discussing them and you have to have people realizing that this has implications for how people live their daily lives and how national policies and international diplomacy this should be undertaken. And the most obvious evidence of that was the focus of emulation moved from countries that were rich and fast growing in economic terms to ones that where people had high evaluations of their lives. High average answers to your question and those were the Nordic countries. Routinely all five of them appeared in if not in the top 10 close to it every year than other countries just to show it wasn't all about Nordic history. Other countries have been top including Switzerland and that's led in those countries to setting up of institutions to study what is special about life here. Do we believe these evaluations? What is it that we think we have learned that we could help other people with? Justice Finland did earlier when that was top of the thesis course and everybody in education went to Finland to find out what they were doing what magic they did. People are now going to the Nordic countries and saying what is it you can tell us or we want to see what's going on here in case there are some lessons for us. Absolutely but I imagine that the Finns are perhaps quite surprised at coming out the happiest country in the world. They are and they weren't of course when the poll started but they've gradually come up through the other Nordic countries and they don't believe it and they say we're not happy we're just meddling along. You then ask them and remind them because it is the world happiness report people are inclined to say oh that's giddiness that's happiness as an emotion. We are quite explicit about this we call the world happiness report because of course the original motion was on on happiness and that was clearly part of the Bhutanese lead so we pretty well had to call it the world happiness report in answer to those people who say if this is just about happiness it's not about the good life in an Aristotelian sense it is not about the deeper things in life. We then make the distinction which many philosophers have made and was quite apparent to Aristotle between happiness as an emotion and happiness as an evaluation. I sometimes say how happy are you with the baggage retrieval system that he throw that is not a question about your emotions it's a question about your judgment and what Aristotle proposed was that people should in a quiet moment think about their lives as a whole and then he hypothesized what would lead them to give high answers and they included of course living a good life living a virtuous life and having friends having happy emotions was part of that story as indeed it is so in the world happiness report in the Gallup world poll the main focus of attention is on the life evaluation the answer to that Aristotelian question your evaluation of life as a whole part of that is the emotion of happiness or negative emotions being measured too and they have an impact on life evaluations the pass through from positive emotions to life evaluations turns out to be more powerful even than the negative ones so once again we remind people that to emphasize and build positive is much more important than identifying and trying to cure the negatives because you're dealing with the building of something better rather than band aids for some injury that has been caused so that's another reason for calling it the happiness report once you emphasize the whole of life then the fins are no longer so surprised because they say oh yes yes we do leave a pretty good life here one finish expert who came to Canada to study things here and visit other countries had said she was surprised that then's being so happy and then she said after visiting a few other countries I realized just how lucky we are in Finland with the extent to which we care about each other care for each other cooperate with each other and of course it shows up in a lot of evidence that's quite independent of surveys but are experiments of dropping wallets all over the world where are they returned and they return most often in Finland minority countries all rank high well that has nothing to do with a nanny state it has nothing to do with living in a cold climate it's just what has been built out from a variety of sources a society where people really do care about each other and to live in such a society is a real pleasure yeah cooperation and trust I wanted to ask you a bit more about the ctrl ladder the question that we started off with and you've talked about what it's measuring how do you think people interpret the question and is it more correlated with income or with effective well-being it's correlated with both to emotions count and especially what counts and we've discovered this from the beginning that the social context in which people live which is of course a source of affective emotions but it's a source of much more than that it's a source of contentment it's a source of trust it's a source of a feeling that you are part of something bigger and surrounded by people who care for you and will work with you when anything should go wrong now there has been some discussion about whether the ladder framing itself pushes you into more material form than a life satisfaction question asked just how satisfied are you with your life we find the determinants because there was one year in the Gallup poll where both questions were asked they're essentially the same there have been some interesting experiments done sort of verbal clues related to the ladder question versus dropping the ladder and keeping the ten points talking about best and worst just use zero and ten and it is true there's a slight increase in the emphasis on material things when you put best possible and worst possible rather than simply zero to ten but it's very much a second order effect and it's quite appropriate that we and others should test and consider alternative ways of asking these questions and of course the conversion into different languages and cultures is a very complicating factor the beauty about the overall question a good life versus a not so good life on zero to ten that doesn't require much translation while a lot of the other ones where you say how happy are you with your life or how satisfied are you with your life the actual words used can have slightly different connotations in other languages it's also true there's some evidence that people of differing income and education are more tempted by focal points on the answer scale picking the bottom the top or the middle versus so more even distribution people of more education tend to be more fine-grained in how they answer and there's some evidence of some cultures that they're more likely to report in the middle and choose a higher or low and all of those effects have been looked at very carefully with experimental data and found to be of some importance but not a deep importance in a sense that they don't change anything very much when you make allowances for them once again second order but that's not surprising because when you look at the fundamentally important factors they're important in all cultures there were a number of so-called eastern values that were thought to be not properly surveyed of japanese foundation kindly and wisely sponsored a special or block of the gallop world poll where those measures were put in there and it turned out these so-called eastern values harmony was one and and focus on others rather than yourself thought to be fundamental to eastern philosophies as they have been and we found that details factors are important but they're important all over the world though they've been focused on differently they mattered everywhere somewhat surprising to the people who thought of the project in the first place the highest values in these eastern values were found in the Nordic countries wonderful so the report what is it identified as the real drivers of well-being well as we discussed earlier the extent to which people care for each other it measured in the variety of ways to have someone to count on in times of trouble the gallop poll doesn't go really deeply into some of these some of the subsequent polls that are coming along are going more deeply in these more buying grain measures of the quality of the social fabric the extent to which people trust other people we i'm continually pushing the wallet question because it measures two things that are both very important one is are people honest of course to find a wallet and return the second element is generosity because you could be perfectly honest and be true to your word without caring so much about the other person because to return a lost wallet means you take time out of your day so it involves empathy i understand how they feel and and a real benevolence to feel you live in a benevolent society is fundamentally what makes people happy of course we discover it's a it's a secret it should be a secret in some ways that to act in benevolent ways actually makes you happier yourself i thought the wallet question was uh was brilliant in order to measure that i don't know how you came up with that i came up with it in a canadian survey that we were running towards the end of the last century and there's a standard trust question that's been asked for now almost a hundred years which is in general do you think people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with other people is just a binary question and one of my colleagues in this survey was a political scientist of a very skeptical a survey expert but saying this is so vague what does it mean we don't know how to interpret this is so we worked out let's ask a question that digs into this but in a way where we know exactly what it means the reader's digest had dropped wallets in the number of cities and found them returned at different rate though we said let's ask the wallet question because a we know exactly what it means and of course we can give different dimensions to it so we said dr wallet was two hundred dollars in it how likely is it to be returned and on a multi-point scale if it was found by a neighbor a police officer a clerk in your local store or a stranger who you find different answers to those things and it was very interesting and we then managed to get it put into the Canadian general social survey so we and had very large support the beauty of the question is you not only can find out which communities people think are more likely to be wallet returning communities than others but you can actually then go out and drop wallets and see whether in general people are too optimistic or too pessimistic about it it was very striking when was Toronto newspaper the Toronto Star without understanding there had been some related science on the question picked up the experiment they dropped wallets around Toronto 20 wallets by that time we had the Canadian general social survey and we knew with a tiny margin of uncertainty what people in Toronto thought the chances would be if their wallet were being returned if it was found by a stranger and the average expected return of wallets was 25% or 23.4% about a quarter with a tiny degree of uncertainty the actual return of wallets was 80% so we immediately discovered that through the media and through what's regarded as general feeling of negativity bias that people and it was argued there was a historic reason for this to not step on snakes and so on that that people paid more attention to negative news than positive news the media picked that up and it became one of those standard features if it bleeds it leads so if you get the news filled with negative things not positive things then you say well how do people know whether their wallets are likely to be returned because the overall news is about people who by and large you think might not return your wallet and in fact would be more likely to steal it a critically important feature of the wallet question that we haven't got from any of these other trust questions is whether people on average are too trusting or not trusting enough and it's quite clear from this and we know that people's own actions depend dramatically on how benevolent they think the environment is if you really think they'd all return your wallet you would in fact treat that next stranger you see not as a stranger with a threat attached but as a friend you hadn't met yet and so would to identify in a scientifically solid way that people are not as trusting as they ought to be has implications for how we should be organizing all of our institutions and not having a lot of risk mitigating strategies that close doors in schools and in prisons and in elder care facilities keeping people sheltered in place and essentially dying from lack of exposure to the chance to help others and connect with others when in fact there'd be a much bigger gain by allowing them the old and the young to connect in a ways that would enliven both so there are the implications once you find out and believe that in fact risk aversion is a high cost activity and it's increased dramatically over the last 20 years and it is inconsequence closing doors even more between groups who could be and should be connecting adventaciously because we know there's a positive circle that when people do connect more they know each other better they trust each other more and the benevolent acts are growing this of course has global implications for multilateralism and all kinds of other things as well we've talked about it in individual terms but it's equally true across societies it's true you've spoken so well about the implications i wondered if you just say perhaps a little bit more about if we were to place well-being really at the center of policy and decision-making what difference it would make i think you make it very clear part of it is saying well you know we already have units in governments designed to help evaluate different projects and so things that in fact would either increase or decrease the level of trust in a community used to get put in the footnotes to the cost-benefit analysis which was usually measured in terms of jobs and income and other easily measurable things in economic terms cost-benefit analysis has been officially changed in the united kingdom and some other countries to bring the other factors that influence well-being into the kind of an analysis that the people are supposed to be doing and of course that's led to the requirement for important training courses in the science of well-being for the people who are now supposed to be doing and that's a long way from where they started out because it's not in the curricula of the public policy schools they study at the graduate programs in economics they study it that's where these policy advisors tend to come from so you not only need to change the methods that people use you have to change the training of the people who do these things and that's part of it to actually say well you know it's not just talk if we're really going to focus on well-being we have to have it in every decision so you have to be looking for these non-conventional impacts it means you have to be measuring subjective well being before and after these interventions that you're doing you have to be measuring it for all the participants and we studied one of these linkages of the old and the young people said well how will it affect the students well of course we're changing the lives of everyone involved so we were making sure we were studying the well-being of the student of their families of the elder care and staff of the people living in these elder care facilities so you have to have your ears and eyes open saying I care about the well-being of all the people involved in this process you think about that in a corporate boardroom you could imagine that changes the way in which firms ought to evaluate how well they're doing there's some powerful evidence that Tiana Manuel de Neve wanted the editors has been doing with indeed showing in fact that firms that actually care about and deliver happier workplace environments do much better than other firms independent of all the other things that people have long paid attention to indeed yes so perhaps we can talk a little bit about the report itself this year's report that came out as you said earlier on world happiness day in March would you like to give us a little overview of the state of happiness around the world you've already talked about the countries at the top of the ranking and how big though is the well-being gap between those at the top and those that rank the lowest and has that distributed we talk about six variables that we measure in all countries because they're in the survey or another data GDP per capita healthy life expectancy those are essentially derived from UN statistics or various international statistics with a UN imprint and then four other variables that come out of the survey that reflect more about the social context in which societies are governed one is the level of corruption is not a complete measure of trust it doesn't get into wallets and that sort of thing but it is very helpful and another is do you have someone to count on in times of trouble and a third is so how generous are you help benevolent are you and of course average of that gives you an idea about how benevolent society is and then importantly how much freedom do you feel to make your key life decisions and that turns out to be a primary important so all four of those social factors are enormously important so we rank those as well you're asking about the gap between the top ones and the bottom the countries at the top do well in all of those six things the countries at the bottom do badly on all of them so it isn't just one aspect of life it isn't just rich or poor or healthy or unhealthy it's all of these things in the countries at the top the number of people who don't have someone they get count on in times of trouble is in the small single digits out of a hundred a while there are other countries where almost half the population doesn't feel they have someone to count on in times of trouble of course it could be really happy with your life you need not just one person you need be supported by a much bigger group the average gap between the top countries in the bottom it can be up around seven for the top countries it can be three or below a solus a factor of more than two some people have argued that just because you see a lot of happy people or people acting with goodwill to each other and smiles on their faces in the poorest and most miserable and war torn conditions that people will report they're happy when they're not because they're acting happy our interpretation now is no everybody does the best with what they have even if your overall circumstances are miserable but it doesn't mean they answer this life of value questions saying the best possible life I'm there just because I'm smiling I said well it isn't there they give answers that are right down at the bottom of that scale even if they are acting happy in the streets and in their families because you do because that's what you want right you want those kind of warm relations you want to do good for others and end within your family you're just highly constrained and that leads people to recognize this is not the best possible life for me in my country now but I can make the best of what I can do okay you wanted to know about this year's report every year we have a different theme and this year for the first time it goes down a manual proposed to do a chapter on well-being of school-age children through a variety of surveys you so we said well let's make this more general and look at life evaluations over the whole life course that led us to have a special chapter on dementia delivering better happiness allows people to live better with dementia that was a very interesting one we had never had a chapter especially devoted to India we'd had one or two on China and on the United States but we had not had an Indian chapter and now of course the largest country in the world and so we were able to leverage Indian experts who were able to leverage for us a very large survey of elder population in India and so then that allowed us to have two chapters specifically focused on the elder populations and then we had the youth chapter in education and then the chapter that I'm more in charge with was really trying to bring the bits together the happiness of the old the young and those in between and the dramatic finding we found was there were some countries where over the last decade because we now have a long enough run of the Gallup world poll and and the reports we can see a big drop in life evaluations of the young in some countries and in particularly was in that group of countries was for developed ex-colonial countries of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, rich, well-educated, technologically up-to-date but increasingly unhappy and it was true whether you divided the society into millennials, Gen Z, you know, generational terms or simply divided by age groups the beauty of the Gallup world poll is that we're not just focused on particular countries we were then say well so to what extent is this general across the world and the answer is not at all general across the world it's very specific can't just be through the extent of social media as we find a number of countries where social media use thank to some other survey work done as part of the Gallup world poll on use of social media that especially among the young it's very high everywhere the big drop which is still needing and getting a lot of attention among the youth well-being in certain countries what its sources are and hence what can be done to reverse it and we're seeing in other countries and this was another feature that has been going on for a while came to a head in our analysis emphasizing youth that there has been a well-being convergence between Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe that's been going on now not ever since 1990 the divergence after 1990 but once things started to turn around it's been converging and for both young and old are getting happier in eastern and central Europe but in eastern and central Europe as opposed to the United States where and Canada where now the older happier than the young the young are happier than the older by a full point on the 10-point scale both have been getting happier but in that gap between the old and the young and Western Europe isn't there it's not quite as in favor of the oldest as the United States but much more even that the young in central and eastern Europe are now as happy as the young and Western Europe so the convergence is complete in well-being terms and for the older generation you can see a variety of reasons for that in Kosovo and other parts of the region that suffered so terribly in the 1990s the older bearing more of the scars than the young and the young are now fortunately it was lots of this talk about second-generation damage that in fact the young are binding themselves more able to see the need to rebuild a peaceful collaborative environment and clearly feel there are possibilities for doing so and are inclined to do so another feature of our results this year was that we have found the benevolence the increased benevolence that took place during the COVID years which is a focus of some of our previous reports that when we looked at it in generational terms because there's been a lot of talks especially in the United States millennials and post-millennials being the me generation not the we generation oh there's been a debate we found that despite being unhappy in some of these countries the younger generation have been at least as likely as their elders to have stepped up during COVID and reached out and helped strangers and and donated and volunteered so that's very encouraging despite being unhappy the they're ready to act in benevolent ways there's lots of good news in there I just wanted to ask you know what else is there needed for us to focus on well-being we talked earlier in our conversation about what the implications are for people and I said implications are there for everybody for people and for institutions and I think that's fundamental and it's a big change because when I talk about these things to groups a lot of groups I talk to are looking for how they can have happier lives and others are looking at us what can be done to make institutions support happier lives and they're both important but then they hear it and they go back and they act tomorrow the same way they acted yesterday so what has to happen is everybody has to change their mindset so it affects how you actually behave in the elevator in your workplace how actually you think about the people in the lunch queue behind you or in front of you so that kind of reaching out that people who are busy or occupied or something tend to forget they tend to isolate themselves in a social environment and it's part because they don't believe as much as they should back to the wallet data in the benevolence of those others and how much they will actually have to learn from others and to be supported by others so that kind of reaching out has implications in how we set up all our international agencies and so a consultation is not just listening to somebody at a meeting and going back and doing what you did before so it isn't a box to be ticked it's a change in the way you do things so in the corporate sphere it's companies that go out and treat their customers and not as somebody to be just served but people to be engaged in the innovation side of the business how could we do things better and actually not just asking that question and filing the responses but actually getting that to be part of the decision making process and that's true in individual health care journeys it's true of the way in which classrooms are organized it's true in the way in which workplaces should be managed it should be true in the way in which intergovernmental relations are managed subnational governments management of urban districts which of course increasing part of world governance is about how cities are managed it's how different ministries relate within nations and of course it's especially true for things like climate change and war and peace the same thing is true at the international level which means you don't simply follow an oppositional culture and this is a tendency now that news feeds are not general but they're specific and they're self-driven that people tend to have different information universes and so that exaggerates your ignorance of the other and ignorance of the other drives schisms between people so to connect with others who you may not think you share their values or anything but to find ways of connecting with them and seeing things from their point of view is the only route to common purpose and common action and so there's a one version of that that needs to be designed and discussed with the unhappy young who really out there the people who are going to be managing things in the next generation to get out of their slough despond and ask what they can do about it because once you're convinced to do something about it you not only can help solve the problem but you're happier in the process because that's the other part of the lesson that moaning about something and and bad milking somebody else is neither a source for happiness for them nobody likes being bad moat but it's not a source of happiness for you just as in traffic to waive the other person on makes both people happy while the reverse makes both people unhappy this is true in diplomacy as well as it is anywhere else so this way in which institutions are managed opening doors as between the institutions genuinely opening them so it means cross-silo innovations that you could see how it would play out in the way every department in every government in every country was run well that's wonderful advice and i really do hope that we start taking happiness much more seriously so finally john it's a library and archives and books and makers very happy do you have a good book recommendation for for us well i read a great deal of fiction of all kinds so i'm trying to think what what would be a well this is the this is desert island discs i tell you what i would do being mortal it's by atoll atul go on beach you may or may not know of him but he's a a surgeon who was responsible for many of the guidelines for getting accidents down in in operating rooms but he also has studied different communities and age relations and so on it's a beautiful book i was searching for something that is just a wonderful read with marvelous examples and yet having the right kind of implications for a good life i've read it several years ago and but i've i go back to his work because he it's always good stuff but i think that book is probably the the best place to start well thank you very much professor hallewell for your time for joining us today and for all your enthusiasm and the happiness that you brought us thank you thank you (gentle music)
